Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What are the featured books in this episode?
This is an ABC podcast
Hi, welcome to The Bookshelf, your weekly dose of fiction on air, online, on the ABC Listen app. I'm Kate Evans and Cassie McCullough. You've been away for a few weeks.
Welcome back. Thank you very much for that. And I'm excited about next week's book club, which is going to be, Kate?
On all things speculative fiction and fantasy, with a focus on N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became.
Yeah, so get reading if you haven't already. There's a load of fantasy writers making cameo appearances in next week's program. Raymond E. Feist. Wow, that's a big name. Christopher Paolini and Maria Lewis. Kate?
Well, make sure you head to the ABC Book Club Facebook group as well or email us with your thoughts on The City We Became or other fantasy fiction that you recommend.
OK, well, that's what we're doing next week. This week, though, we have a lot of realist fiction around, including Sarah Moss's Summer Water, which is set in a rainy holiday camp in Scotland.
And Ian Maguire's The Abstainer, which takes us to Manchester in the 1860s.
But let's start with Australian fiction and Jock Sorong's new book, The Burning Island.
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Chapter 2: How does Jock Serong's The Burning Island explore historical events?
So there's Eliza and her father. There's the ship's master, Mr Herman Argyle, who just appears on deck the first day wearing a frock. And you don't really know why. And I love the way that everybody just had to sort of look sideways at this man in a dress and then just deal with it.
There's a sort of comment that he wouldn't be able to do it on land or even in the Sydney Cove, in Sydney Harbour, but as soon as he sets sail and he's heading towards Sydney Heads, the dress goes on and more and more dresses appear as the voyage goes on. It's a wonderfully eccentric element to the book and nothing much is said about it until a little bit later on when more is revealed.
But who else is on this ship, Cassie, that makes up this little floating community?
Well, there's these really quite lovely twins, the Connolly twins, Declan and Angus. They had been separated. They're convicts. They had been separated when they were young. And so one has a Scottish accent and one has an Irish accent. And they're either fighting or laughing and having a riotous time together. One of them's been injured and he's intellectually handicapped in some way.
I wasn't quite certain what it was, but they managed to rile each other up, but then always having their arms around each other. And they have a great presence on the ship, even though they're at times annoying. Then the enigmatic Dr Gideon, who is a man of science, who is on the trip because he wants to go to these islands and pick up specimens of aquatic and bird life.
and send it back to England. Now, he's doing that because they're immensely valuable, but also because he seems to have this burning passion to understand the fish and fowl of the southern east coast of Australia. So he's got all kinds of equipment.
And I was actually reminded initially of the beginning of Oscar and Lucinda and Oscar's father, who had a similar obsession prowling around on the rock platforms and looking at shell life and the patterns and the intricacy and the sort of divine order that was visible to him in the sea life.
I kept on thinking about why it was important to make this character an amateur naturalist. Because in this period, it's like those figures are moving us from one type of world into the modern world, because they're trying to make sense of this strange new place that they don't understand. But they're also doing it in a way that's different to 21st century science, because it ties in with
you know, philosophy and religion and all sorts of things. So it was a really clever choice, I think, to make him an amateur naturalist. But he's also a character who likes the sound of his own voice and likes to hold forth to Eliza, which is where her voice and perspective cuts through, because occasionally you can sort of hear her inner eye rolling as this man wants to explain the world to her.
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Chapter 3: What themes are present in Sarah Moss's Summerwater?
The ferocious barking turned to a brief yelp of pain and Munro picked a stick from the sand. He waved it threateningly at the animal so it cowered and slunk back along the slack rope. So that's the dog that greets them on the beach. And then a page or two later, they get up to a hut.
And they find, lo and behold, more dogs about the doorway, about half a dozen or more mongrels, large, stout, thin, mangy, a miscellany of God's forgotten beasts. One carried a bone, high and proud, like an heirloom. There was no fury in them, not like the dog at the beach. If we had come this far, we must be here by consent.
So, you know, it's just a sort of random description of these dogs that the party encounter, but it gives you a sense of the language, the richness, the ideas behind each phrase. It's really great writing.
Jock Sorong's The Burning Island is published by Text.
Well, let's meet today's guests on the bookshelf. Aoife Clifford is a novelist, a bookseller and a bookshelf regular. Her books include All These Perfect Strangers and Second Sight. Hi, Aoife.
Hello. How are you?
Aoife, the last time we spoke to you, you were in Melbourne's first lockdown. How are you going this time around?
Well, I feel like we must be in lockdown three, lockdown 2.5. I'm not sure. Look, all things considered, we're going well.
Yeah, I'm sure it's tough as. And you've got a fairly, well, rambunctious household all working from home and all kinds of things. So, yeah.
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Chapter 4: How does Ian McGuire's The Abstainer relate to historical events?
But before we get to it, Emily Maguire, you've been binging on Sarah Moss's books, I understand. Why?
I have. And it's so wonderful when you find a writer you love and realise that they actually have an extensive backlist that you can work your way through. So I read Ghostwall earlier this year and absolutely loved it. It's a very sort of tight, short, claustrophobic kind of book, as is Summerwater, which we'll get to.
And then I went from that to The Tidal Zone, which I think is actually one of the best books I've read in a long time. I really want to go back and reread it already. And she just has this incredible way of writing about, you know, she has this real sense of dread and threat, but it's not necessarily a sense that something, some big dramatic event is going to happen.
It's like the existential dread of life when you, know that, you know, yourself and everyone you love is like a breakable, continually wearing down body living in a world. And it's sort of this continuous sense of dread and fear of loss.
And the title zone is very much about how do we just get on with things and value our lives in the moment, even when we know that eventually we're going to lose each other.
Yeah, it's best not to think of it sometimes, isn't it?
Yeah. So she's sort of in that book, particularly the point of view father, point of view character of the title zone is a dad whose teenage daughter has an unexplained, potentially fatal heart problem. So it sort of starts with this jolt of terror going into this very ordinary middle-class family's life. And, you know, you do have this sense of dread, like, is this girl going to be okay?
But the story becomes much more than that.
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Chapter 5: What character dynamics are explored in The Abstainer?
It really becomes about living with this
acceptance that that what is true of that particular teenage daughter is is true of everybody that there's always this potential loss there that sounds amazing it is and you know it sounds sad and a little bit uh depressing which i guess there's elements of thinking too deeply about this stuff that is but but the writing is so beautiful and the attention she pays to to the characters and and really just those ordinary everyday interactions that
that is, you know, looking back on a life, I guess, is where all the meaning and the connection happens.
And Aoife Clifford, when you heard we were going to read Summer Water, you were keen to read it too, weren't you?
Yes, for the exact same reason as Emily was, which was I read Ghost Wall last year and loved it. I thought it was one of the best books of the year for me because it was such a tightly small, I mean, it's almost a novella, you could say, but it was such an amazing book. So I was really excited to read this one.
I haven't read any of the others, so I might be having a look for some of Emily's recommendations of what to read next from Sarah Moss, because I think she's wonderful.
Well, now that we've set up all those big expectations, the easiest way to describe the outline of this new novel that we've all read, Summerwater, is to hear from the writer herself. So here's Sarah Moss explaining the story.
I'd say that it's set in one day on a holiday park in Scotland on the banks of Loch and it rains all day and we follow six households from morning through to evening with one person from each household and the question is really how a group of people cope in isolation when everything that they'd hoped for isn't happening. I started thinking about the book when we were
in Scotland in a holiday park and it rained all the time and at the time I was officially working on a much heavier and more scholarly novel and I became fascinated by these little worlds each of these damp little cabins held its own small world of a family and they were all next to each other but people weren't really talking to each other and I could never quite work out why they weren't talking to each other but I didn't talk to anybody either so clearly whatever it was I shared it
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Chapter 6: How do the characters' backgrounds influence their actions?
She's running at dawn. It's pounding rain. There's barely any light. She notices the presence of a man in a tent in the woods just beyond the holiday park. Then as she's sort of heading back, she suffers this flutter in the chest, which again, immediately reminded me of the tidal zone, which does start with a teenage girl experiencing heart problems.
So you've already got all this sense of danger, both in the environs itself and also within the body of this woman. And, you know, she sort of reflects, we learned that she's had this heart problem before. She's been told straight out by a doctor to give up on the running, or if she won't, she should certainly not ever do it alone.
she actually disregards that in her own mind, even as she says there's a menagerie going on in her chest. And she thinks, what's another person going to do if my heart stops? How is it going to help to have a witness? And then we leave her there.
Well, we leave her there. And I had no idea what I was in for, really, with this novel, whether the whole thing was going to be from the perspective of Justine and her almost Joycean in a monologue, which is a bit frantic, even though, as you say, it's full of these everyday sort of banal observations. I mean, it's quite fascinating, but quite intense.
But then there's another interlude about bedrock and we meet another character, an older man, a retired doctor. So Aoife, if we could bring you back in, you've read it too. What did you think was going on as we meet more and more characters?
Well, it was sort of interesting and almost what she was, Sarah Moss talked about in that little clip that we were listening to,
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Chapter 7: What literary techniques enhance the storytelling in this episode?
is that we are in these little bubbles and we're not just in the bubbles, we're in their minds. That stream of consciousness, we sort of enter that again and again for different characters. And it builds up, manages to sort of build up with everyone's little subjective truths about this holiday and the weather, managed to build up this enormous picture of the world.
And what I loved about it was because it was sort of contrasting those little individual bubbles of people's minds with kind of the permanency of the landscape, like the inevitability of the lock. And like Emily was mentioning, the lock is a real foreboding character in it, the kind of this lurking kind of gloom.
We have some of the characters, well, one character in particular, go out on the lock. They're all looking at the lock. But because it's Sarah Moss, you're looking in one direction and you're about to head off somewhere totally different. You're going to get blindsided by something totally different behind you.
I really enjoyed, one of the things I enjoyed most about it was thinking about it like from a crime novelist perspective and also even thinking of Emily's last book as well. We often start at the dramatic event, that being sort of the stone getting thrown into the lake and then following the ripples, whereas Sarah Moss is actually doing the opposite.
She's watching the lake and the surrounds and the people and she kind of ends the book where we would start beginning and so gives a whole new perspective on it, which I really loved.
And that scene that you referred to of the character who does go on the lake, I thought was extraordinary because it's a boy, a teenage boy, and he heads towards the lock in sort of resentment. And then he's there in absolute joy in his own body on this beautiful place. And then it ends in fear.
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Chapter 8: What are the predictions for the upcoming book club discussion?
And you're just thrown into all these different emotions and descriptions in this extraordinary way. What do you say, Emily?
Yeah, absolutely. That was one of my favourite chapters, actually, with Alex out on the boat. I mean, he does sort of head out there because drowning in a lock in torrential rain is more preferable to him than staying in the cabin with his teenage sister and parents for any longer.
But you're right, he does, much like Justine in that first chapter, when he's out in it and in his body, there's a real sense of joy. And the danger is always there. It's a really dangerous situation he's put himself in. And then again, there's sort of
dispatches from the natural world that come between each of the character chapters they kind of really underline all this and they were the bits that really gave me the shivers it's right after that chapter with Alex out on the kayak that there's one of these little short chapters and there's a description of the lock that he's just been in and it says that at the bottom of it are the remnants the small boats of boys in every century who never came home and the water holds the hand stitches of their clothes and the cow ghosts of their shoes and the amulets that did not help when they were needed
It's incredible writing and it is, you know, as Aoife said too, this sense of there's sort of these individuals in their bubbles concerned with their own sometimes petty, sometimes huge problems and they are just each a vulnerable, really impermanent body and this deep history of the place they're in goes on.
I loved it. So he has this amazing kind of battle with the elements. He drags himself back. And then his mum sort of says, oh, God, will you close the door? Are you letting the wind in? You know, with no idea of this amazing battle that's just happened out on the lot and that's such an important part of his life. I just thought, It's beautifully done, beautifully done.
But as much as that sense of dread is happening, I mean, partly because of the landscape and the writing, I mean, there is one strange child, this, you know, there's, well, there are two unusual children. There's a little girl, I think her name is Lily, who behaves in quite a ghastly way. And then there's another child who's like the stranger upon whom attention gathers.
Emily, what's going on with one of the cabins? The only one we don't actually get inside, but that everybody else looks at.
Yeah, and this was, I guess, my biggest disappointment in the book. Disappointment's probably too strong a word, but
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